Snippets

 I turn the car around, head west up the easement, can’t see for the sunlight, pull the visor down, doesn’t help, I’m blinded by the light. I find the Hotel Recamier on a bookmark in Proper Name by Bernadette Mayer, Un Hôtel Chic À Saint-Germain de Prés. I remember passing the wall mural of “Le bateau d’ivre” early in the morning to go for a run in Le Jardin de Luxembourg. Paganini’s violin bow going all over the musical spectrum on YouTube, coming to me through noise-cancelling earphones, drowning out the noises from the kitchen above. Tuxedo cat sleeping on a blanket of fluffy blue sheep on a white background, curled, white nose on white paws. Those squiggles on Oreo cookies, a text for the tongue until it crumbles followed by a surge of sweetness in the white frosting. Sinking feeling when I overhear one of the internet cable workers announce to his colleagues “I discovered something.” Not what you want to hear after several days of service disruption, confusion, misinformation, chaos & noise. Another reminder of the precipitous drop in competence in late capitalist society. Story on the French news about men in Senegal devoted to saving the sea turtle, a group of men pulling a huge sea turtle into their shallow draft wooden boat, one of them stroking the turtle’s head as the creature is examined for wounds & ill health. One of the men dives in after it’s been released, legs & flippers agitating in clear water. A female acupuncturist in Phoenix, Arizona has signed up for a trial test for a Covid-19 vaccine. How do I know this? I check Google News every day for reports on a vaccine. R tells me two more Seattle businesses went under, Bamboo Garden Vegetarian Cuisine & the College Inn in the University District, where I used to eat dinner after work at Mailing Services every day after my divorce. I keep thinking about Rod Stewart’s model train layout & the extreme attention to detail. Even the pavements look used. Magritte’s The Human Condition – an oil painting of an oil painting on an easel in front of a window that is itself a painting of the scene from a window – is reflected back at me on the bedroom closet mirror, with the name Magritte at the bottom in big black letters spelled backwards.